'I thought I could never get out and so I gave up. I'm going to be dead. Am I going to Heaven or Hell?'

By Charles Laurence in Toronto

He sensed that they were the last moments of his life. Engulfed in screams, smoke and flames, Ju La cowered in his seat on Air France Flight 358 and found himself wondering whether he was going to Heaven or Hell.

The student counsellor from Derby was among seven Britons aboard the plane, which ploughed into a ravine and burst into flames last Tuesday after landing in a violent thunderstorm at Toronto.

Miraculously, all 297 passengers and 12 crew escaped with their lives but five days later Mr La still cannot shake off his fear.

"The whole landing process was wrong," he says, speaking for the first time about the crash. "It was not just the weather, it was a very heavy drop and then you could feel it pick up speed and it kept going, going, going, bigger and bigger bumps, and then a crash.

"Everyone was thrown forward, the bins opened and the luggage fell everywhere. And then there was just screaming.

"When the plane crashed to a stop, I looked out and saw the smoke and then the flames and I thought, 'This is it for me.'

"The smoke - not just smoke but clouds of heaving, stinking smoke - was coming from the front towards the back. Everyone was screaming and we thought the plane was going to blow up.

"I couldn't get up, I thought I could never get out and for a few seconds I gave up. My life is coming to an end. I'm going to be dead. Where do I go from here? Am I going to Heaven or Hell?"

Only the plight of his fellow passengers, particularly a large group of French and Canadian teenagers seated around him, jolted him from his stupor.

The 48 schoolchildren were on the second leg of an exchange trip, in which the French pupils were visiting Canadian families. Lisa Popow, 15, and her French exchange Aurelie Durel, 16, from Flamanville, near Rouen, were sitting nearby in row 36.

They watched as flames licked through the forward lavatory and along the port wing of the plane as smoke rolled down the aisles.

"There were a few seconds when it was almost fun, like a roller-coaster ride, but then there was this moment when people were clapping the landing and screaming at the same time. I realised that we were crashing and I was going to die," said Lisa, now home in Scarborough, outside Toronto, but still struggling to sleep at night after her experience.

"The plane stopped and I crashed forward onto the arm I'd stuck in front of my face. When I looked up, I saw the flames. One of the air crew was yelling, 'Everybody get out, get out, get out'. Then you could see the flames and smoke in front and she shouted 'Not forward! Exit at the back! Not that way!'

Lisa kept a remarkably cool head but Aurelie was frozen, holding on to her friend, sobbing and calling for a last hug before she died. Aurelie remembers how her friend helped her. "I felt there was nothing we could do, but Lisa made me pick up my carry-on bag and I held on to her so tightly as we climbed over the seats to the corridor, and then found the exit at the back."

Both girls looked out at torrential rain and dimly visible trees in the late-afternoon gloom. The ground yawned far below as the plane had come to rest nose-down. From their vantage point the jump looked impossible, the escape chute plunging almost vertically to earth.

Unlike some of their fellow passengers who broke limbs as they jumped, both girls escaped unscathed. Lisa lost a shoe as, still clutching Aurelie, they scrambled through the undergrowth, up the bank and on to a service road, where some survivors hitched lifts with stunned motorists who stopped to help.

Ju La, who has lived in Britain for 17 years since leaving Jamaica, followed the students out. "I saw the crew pushing out people who were too afraid, using force if necessary. People were great. They helped each other, not just going for their own survival."

If their immediate trauma was over, it was only just beginning for Lisa's parents, Karl and Sandy Popow, who were waiting in the terminal at Pearson International Airport.

"I had been over at the flight indicators, away from Sandy, when someone started shouting that Flight 358 had crashed and everyone was a fatality," said Mr Popow, fighting back tears. "For a minute and a half I think, I thought my daughter was dead."

Mrs Popow said: "I remembered that we had given Lisa a phone so we could contact her as she landed, and I thought I could at least try calling her. She answered!" Even then, it was six hours before the Popows could hold their daughter and know, as Sandy put it "that we had been given our child twice".

While the Air France crew has been universally praised for the textbook evacuation, the airport authorities have been criticised for their treatment of the survivors in the immediate aftermath. According to Ju La, it took two hours even to move the buses full of the cold, wet and bruised passengers from the crash site, where they were parked within 100 yards of the flames, to the terminal.

"I kept saying 'Drive, drive, drive!' but the driver said he couldn't move until he was told to by the police," said Mr La.

Later, the survivors had to wait in buses and airport buildings with not even a hot drink for hour after hour. Many had lost their passports and were held up by immigration and customs officials.

"At the terminal, the officials spent hours proving identities and I felt like I was a prisoner under interrogation," Mr La said. "That's one part of the business they need to work on. We didn't need that!"

Crash investigators are looking into evidence that the airbus A340-300 touched down in a "long landing", almost halfway down the runway.

Preliminary reports from Real Levasseur, the leading investigator for Canada's Transportation Safety Board (TSB), revealed that the airbus missed the runway stripes, known as "piano keys", about one-eighth of the way down the 1.6 mile runway where it should have touched down.

Instead it landed nearly halfway down, travelling at 160mph, and skidded off the end of the runway at 95mph, crashing to a halt 200 yards further on in mud and woods at the edge of the Etobekoke Creek ravine.

The landing had been delayed by the storms, the airport lashed by wind, rain and lightning.

The airbus had enough fuel to go on Montreal, but after a long circle over Lake Ontario, the crew decided to land.

The 43-year-old co-pilot, who has 10,000 hours' flying experience, was at the controls, and decided to land manually. The pilot is in hospital with back injuries and is being allowed to recover before being questioned. Neither has been identified. "We don't use the words 'pilot error' anymore, but 'human factors' are huge," said Mr Levasseur.